A recent study by Alex Jones, a professor at Gettysburg College and his colleague, Robin Kramer of the University of Aberdeen, asked the question: Are faces with makeup more attractive than faces without?

They asked participants to rate the same faces both with and without makeup and judge that one was deemed more attractive.They postulated that if makeup is important for attractiveness, it should overcome the variation in attractiveness between faces easily.However, if makeup made little difference in attractiveness, the variation in faces could overshadow the benefit of makeup.

The conclusions gleaned by Jones and Kramer illustrated that makeup did make a difference in attractiveness.However, not as much as perhaps thought.They found the application of makeup explained for only 2% of the variation in perception between faces.Granted, makeup might have a psychological effect on the wearer and therefore boost one’s self-esteem and ego.This, in turn, could make the person wearing makeup appear more attractive on the whole because they felt better about themselves and it showed in their behavior.

VIVA GLAM Magazine agrees with this study in that makeup does make women appear more attractive.However, we believe it is more than 2%. Here’s why: we have accumulated years of experience in the beauty industry and believe there are also two factors that need to be considered:

1. type of face

2. style of makeup applied

In general, faces close to the Golden Ratio don’t need much makeup to look more attractive.Whereas, faces far from the Golden Ratio will benefit from corrective makeup (contouring, sculpting, shading) which will bring their faces closer to the Golden Ratio. This, in turn, will make their faces appear much more attractive. In many cases, wrong application of makeup for your type of face can actually make you look unattractive.

The basic idea of Golden Ratio, according to Da Vinci, is that when you divide the height of the face with the width you should get 1.618. This is what the eye perceives as proportionally balanced.

The bottom line is, every face is different and understanding the proportions of your face with makeup application will either make a small or huge difference in attractiveness. And we know it is definitely way more than 2%!